John Sickels' top 20 Jay prospects are up. For comparison, here is Jordan's top 30 from September.

Brandon League and David Purcey are the top rated prospects on John Sickels' list. Aaron Hill and Josh Banks rank 1, 2 on Jordan's.

Pistol linked, in another thread, to an online article by Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci, who spent some time in the Blue Jays’ training camp this spring and has written about it for SI. Better him than Garth Brooks, I say. Suiting up for a big-league team is the secret dream of virtually everyone who writes about baseball, and Verducci clearly had a blast doing that in Dunedin. The article is a lively read, and promises an equally lively feature piece in SI. But it also scores a very positive hit for the Blue Jays organization in other ways.

*** UPDATE: the game was cancelled due to bad weather and will not be rescheduled. ***

I expect this to be a dull game thread -- not only is this game not on the radio or on TV, it's not on the radio or TV in Pittsburgh and it's not being webcast at all.

So, I suggest that we keep our eyes on the slow-to-update box scores at Yahoo and wherever else we can find 'em and make up our own totally fake play-by-play.

Dave Stieb was named to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame a couple of weeks ago, and that seemed a good enough reason to look back at one of the greatest Blue Jays of them all.

Those of you not old enough to have seen him in his prime, from 1981 through 1985: trust me. You really missed something. No one else quite like him.

It is written in the Acts Of The Scribes,

Split squads today -- half the team is hosting the Phillies, and the other half is visiting Minnesota. Again. How many times do we have to play those guys? It's like they're the Spring Training Yankees.

One of the two games is being webcast for free at bluejays.com.

That's J.P. Ricciardi's winning percentage since he came on board according to The St Pete. Times. Have we reached a point in the newspaper game where the easiest of all fact-checking goes by the wayside? If you follow baseball, you know that it takes a special team to play .333 for one year. But for 3 years? In their chart right above, they show when J.P. became GM. That's 3 years and counting. 3 years is about 486 games. The W-L record they show is 131-254 (or 385 games). So, there's around 100 games unaccounted for, and we all know that it's darn near impossible to play .340 for 3 years under the radar. The biggest disappointment will be if someone actually quotes these numbers as fact. Let's wait and see...

Go to aarongleeman.com. That’s it. That’s my preview.




No, seriously. We’re all done here. Go home.

As Mike Green works through another Hall Watch preview -- this one tabbing Barry Bonds as a guy who, like it or not, "will (appropriately) walk into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot" -- it's time for another Hall of Names sidebar.

But what to do with Barry?

Say it aint so, Barry. Tell me that ballplayers are athletes and not entertainers. Tell me that while almost everybody lies sometimes, that doesn't make it right. Ah, forget it.

Another blast from the past while we await the return of baseball to our frosty shores. Here we have Frank Menechino hitting a home run off of our old buddy Mark Hendrickson:

The Blue Jays jumped all over Kevin Millwood with a five-run first and never looked back as they walloped a Cleveland split squad 12-9 in a game that was more one-sided than the score might indicate. The boxscore is available here.

Ah, lunch time on Monday, possibly the dreariest time at work except for maybe 9:00 am on Monday. But today we have baseball to cheer us up...

Sadly, the Jays are not broadcasting today's game. If anyone sniffs out a working Indians feed, please share it.

Two years after one of the worst seasons in baseball history, the Detroit Tigers will finish above .500 and contend for a division title.

With an exciting comeback in the bottom of the ninth the Blue Jays came back to beat the Minnesota Twins yesterday 6-5. Tied at four after four the Jays scored in the bottom of the seventh to take a 5-4 lead. The game looked lost when Jesse Carlson surrendered two in the top of the ninth.

However, the Jays strung together a rally in the bottom of the ninth and pushed two runs across the plate for an exciting, although relatively meaningless, victory. The winning hit was provided by pinch-hitter John-Ford Griffin, which brings forth the question, what does the future hold for Griffin? And what have we said about Griffin in the past?